Diabolical Clay

Well fancy that.

My son is a young man of many talents. Not the least of them being the ability to sometimes make me giggle when I am really pissed off with him.

I was giving David a rather long winded lecture and I was actually working myself up rather nicely into one of my Mother from Hell moods. David was filling up the wood box and so he was walking in and out of the house as I was ranting at him talking to him.

Here is my son midway through our conversation. He is fogging up the window with his breath and writing I heart Mum with his nose..

I threatened him with the camera and my blog and that just encouraged him to start making silly faces at me.

If I wasn’t worried about frostbite I might have written I heart David with my nose as well.

Well maybe hyperventilating isn’t what I am actually doing. It is more like a full scale, mini panic attack combined with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. As well as a little ‘nerner’ voice in my head going,”You idiot, you have really done it now.” My heart starts to beat a little bit faster and my fingers get all tingly. I just want to run away from the computer and stop writing this because the more I type, the more I will have to explain what I have just agreed to do.

*takes a deeep breath*

(…and it was all my own idea as well *sigh*)

Last night I received confirmation that my friend Sue and I had secured gallery space for a short exhibition in October. The gallery’s calendar of exhibitions is always booked one year in advance. They squeezed us in as a mid-week exhibition which means we will open on Monday the 12th and close on Friday the 16th.

One half of me is feeling excitement and enthusiasm and the other half thinks, “Oh shit this is madness” and just wants to run away and hide..”

So now I really need to go and have a proper play with Barbara’s Bum because I think that my slipcast work is up to exhibition standard but my thrown work certainly isn’t.

Eeeeeek!!!  This is where I pretend to be Tim Brooke-Taylor from “The Goodies” and start to yell “Don’t panic! Don’t panic” whilst pretending to be a tea-pot.

To be continued….

Or might not. It all depends.

I have decided to call my torso Barbara. Thanks to Tinkingbell for the idea and apologies to the only Barbara that I actually know. But it is far too late to change my mind now. The torso is very definitely a Barbara.

So I have spent the past two days playing with Barbara’s bum and the ceramic ideas are streaming through my mind at an alarming rate of knots.

I have made two plaster casts of Barbara’s bum in search of the right shape for the bum plates that I want to make. And in the process, an idea for an installation has started to niggle away in the back of my mind.

This is a photo of the first plaster cast that I made.

The photo doesn’t actually do the sensual curves of the mould justice but that is beside the point really. In this mould all I can see is a series of  beetles wings.

I would like to make a series of plates/wall hanging thingies that look like the wings of a beetle. I can see a large wall with about 30 or so of these forms on it in a wavy inverted ‘S’ shape glistening in the light all greeny blue.

This is what happens when I start to work. I think to myself, rightio Kimmie get to work making a bum mould and halfway through the process Barbara’s bum has morphed into a beetle.

*sigh* sometimes it is hard being me.

I think that it was my friend Jientje who posted photos of a Belgian artist who did some interesting things with beetles.

So anyway this is what is going on in my head today. What’s happening in yours my lovelies???

I have copied this from the Tasmanian Times website because I felt that in light of the current outbreak of Swine/Bird Flu, my readers might want to go over and have a look through this e-book.

The author of this free E-book provides a valuable insight into the factors involved leading to the development of zoonotic viral strains and why intensive farming of animals is a serious threat to human health. Of the 12 most infectious diseases that the world has dealt with in the last century, 10 of them are either directly or indirectly, the result of our questionable and unethical animal production practices.

Here is the link, Bird Flu, Pigs Barking Blood.

Please come back and tell me what you think..

I haven’t been inspired to pick up the camera lately. I have a bad case of the can’t be bothereds, but sometimes a morning is just so lovely that you cant ignore it. Wednesday morning was such a morning, these photographs were all taken here at my home, just on sunrise.

For more weekly winners please click over to Lotus and have a hello…

My Mum has been horrendously sick with a multitude of yuckiness that has been caused by the chemotherapy. The two main culprits that have combined to make Mum’s life miserable are a terrible grinding fatigue and horrible nausea.

It is never a pleasant feeling knowing that you are unable to help a loved one.

I feel very frustrated and small in my inability to help my mother.

And now my daughter as well.

Though it has always been a bit different with Veronica. I always hoped that we would find a doctor that would look at Veronica and say, “Oh yes, I know what you have. It is blah blah blah, here take this magic pill and come back and see me Tuesday fortnight…”

*Sigh*Veronica has finally been diagnosed with Ehlers Danlos syndrome. So finally after a  seven year long search for answers, a geneticist examined Veronica and said,” Oh yes a straightforward case. Here are your answers, here is your validation.

” Unfortunately he didn’t have a magic pill.

So here I sit at the computer writing away madly,trying to stop myself from being all mimsy and formulate a plan of attack.

There isn’t much that I can do for my Mother or for Veronica either, apart from what I am doing already. And whilst that is a terrible thing for me to have to admit, that I, the supreme control freak cant actually control what is happening to the ones I love the most .” Hi Mum, Hi Von I love you.” It also means that I can stop looking for my vorpal sword and just focus on supporting the two women who mean the most to me in the whole wide world.

Also there is a voice in my head that whispers to me that things could be much worse.I know that it’s true because generally the voices in my head are full of helpful advice, well except for the one that goes on about zombies in the hospital, that voice needs to develop laryngitis…

The words are burbling away in my mind and I just can’t seem to get them out onto paper in any coherent form. They want to stay tucked inside my head all nice and safe and warm. They want to swirl around in circles and tangents and not be constrained on a screen. They most certainly do not want to be subjected to my loose interpretation of grammar.

Bloody treacherous things, much like emotions I suppose. I think that I am travelling along nicely when all of a sudden something small is enough to push me over the edge.

The little things, the little annoyances, the small inconveniences that can suddenly bring you undone.

Mum’s prescription hadn’t been faxed through to the chemist. A small inconvenience really but it was enough to reduce me to tears.

A sign in a shop window. Torso for sale, $50. Enquire within. Was  enough to make me  happy.

Look! Look! Isn’t she lovely???

I have been toying with the idea of making bum plates for ages now but I couldn’t get anyone to model for me. The bloody sooks my lovely family wouldn’t even consider being my models so that I could make a plaster cast of their various body parts.

When Veronica was 17 she nearly agreed to let me take a plaster cast of her breasts. When I explained that I wanted her to cover her upper torso in vaseline and that she would then have to  lie very still on the kitchen table, for about 20-30 minutes whilst I poured plaster of paris onto her bare skin, she decided that she didn’t want to be my model after all *SIGH*

Now that Vonnie has breastfed two children I occassionally remind her that If she hadn’t been such a sook, she could have owned a set of perky ceramic breasts to remind her of how her boobs looked pre-children. There is a moral in there somewhere…

I am the proud owner of a lovely buxom torso,yay. The sky really is the limit now that I have a model that wont complain at all when I cover her body in plaster.

I have been wanting to take my torso for a walk in the bush as well and photograph her next to some large trees. I have a sculpture lurking in my head that is a tree/woman/suggestion of despair. But I need to remember my keywords for this year are Focus and Resolution. My torso is safely tucked away for later and everytime I walk past her I smile.

Oh look, it is a meme, yippee.

I have been tagged by two Mom’s who blog. Ree the hotfessional and Hyphen-Mama.

This meme was started by Catherine,Her Bad Mother and David from It’s not a Lecture who wanted to see if they could go around the world in 80 clicks. So the rules include linking to them(done that) and nipping over to their blogs and leaving a comment that you have done the meme, so that they can follow the clicks(about to do that right now) around the world.

So here we are on a small island underneath Australia talking about 5 things I love about being a Mother, Hmm…

For me, being a Mum is all about the Five A’s

Art, Accidents, Acceptance, Avoidance and my special favourite Amnesia..

Lets start with the Amnesia shall we?

I suffer from child induced Amnesia. I was slowly recovering from this common form of Amnesia when I became pregnant with my second child.  Sadly, once my pregnancy was confirmed, all hope of normal brain function returning flew right out the window.

My memory shrank in direct proportion to the growth of the child in my belly. Examples of this sometimes very useful form of Amnesia still pop up with alarming regularity in my life today.

I am generally reminded how useful this Amnesia can be, by one of my offspring  managing to bring a conversation around to a point where they say, “Mum, remember that you said that I could have a pet snake/pony/dye my hair green/live in France for a year/pierce my eyebrow/bellybutton/nose.

I will graciously agree, that why yes I do recall agreeing to buy you a swimming pool/ant farm/lasergun/popcornmaker/fake lifesize dinosaur bone. And that the very next time we go into town we will have a look for these essential items.

This is where the children used to wander off, secure in the knowledge that I would cater to their every outrageous demand and my amnesia would kick in within a few minutes and everyone was happy.

Art: Look at this little gem..

Accidents: Life is full of accidents. My two favourite accidents are now  20 years old and nearly 15.

Acceptance: I learned very quickly to accept that I was turning into my Mother. Phrases that as a child, I vehemently swore I would never, ever ever, say to my children were suddenly tumbling from my lips, much to the annoyance of my own offspring,  I constantly spouted familiar phrases such as…

” Because I said so”,

and

“Because I am the Mother, thats why”

and the perennial favourite,

“The wind will change and you will be stuck like that forever.”

Avoidance: please refer back to Amnesia..

There you go my lovelies, the Five A’s of Motherhood. Now I get to Tag some other Mothers who will then tag some more Mothers and off we go Around the world in eighty clicks. YAY

I tag:

Barbara in Britain who has two small children and a lovely wry sense of humour.

Jientje from the aptly named Heaven is in Belgium

Mrs C from America who has six children and writes with honesty and humour.